Three Norwegians who were arrested at Ayios Dometios checkpoint have denied accusations that they intended to kidnap a four-year-old girl living with her Cypriot mother in Nicosia.

The men were taken into custody earlier this week on the basis of a warning from Norwegian police, and were caught with maps to the child’s home and kindergarten. Authorities said they believe the intention was to abduct the girl, and take her back to Norway where her father lives via the Turkish-held north.

The child’s parents are divorced and the mother moved back to Cyprus after gaining full custody of her daughter.

Imagine the fear that little girl would have felt if she had been taken from her home by three complete strangers. Children need routine and familiarity, the sight of those unknown people and the unfamiliar smells and sounds of the north, then the strangeness of boarding a plane without her parent, these experiences would have been traumatic.

Parental abductions on the rise

There has been a sharp increase in parental abduction in the EU as more and more people marry abroad or move away from their home countries. The abductions are usually by one of the parents, but there is a growing trend towards hiring others to do the kidnapping; usually, the more conflicted the divorce is, the more chances there are of one of the parents taking off with their under-aged children.

One study estimates there has been a 56% rise in the number of requests to return children who were illegally removed from their countries by one of their parents. In 2008, 1051 requests were made to EU authorities for children to be returned, and by far the most parental abductions were seen in the UK.

Around 17% of all EU-citizen divorces are with foreigners who come either from EU or third countries, according to the most recent statistics published by the European Parliament. The study does not include marriage and divorce statistics from Cyprus, so it is difficult to get a true picture of how often messy divorces end in child abduction, but there is certainly plenty of evidence published by the media pointing to an increasing trend.

Organisations which form to retrieve children are not always what they appear. Even if they claim to be genuinely concerned about getting the child back to its wronged parent, they may be misled or do the misleading themselves in these highly complex cases.